


fix-it

by kuro49



Category: The Dark Tower (2017)
Genre: M/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-23 17:35:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11994660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/pseuds/kuro49
Summary: If he is a knight, this kid right here is his quest.Or Jake Chambers grows up in Mid-World, tall and still skinny but with a tan to his skin, palms rough and calloused, and with an aim that isn’t half bad even if Roland probably won’t ever say it out right.





	fix-it

**Author's Note:**

> movie 'verse only because i never read the books, lbr i haven't read a book in YEARS.

 

There are many names for it in every world that exists. In this one, it means a lot like inevitability and feels a lot like fate.

If Roland Deschain is a knight, this kid right here is his quest.

He meets Jake Chambers once before. He makes a choice (not a mistake), he leaves him for dead. He meets Jake Chambers for a second time, and the kid looks nothing like he remembers but that is the least of his problems here. It is the sequence in which this repeats itself, he is damned to start this again and to have it end the same way: His choice, _his_ death.

“I know you.”

Roland never does quite say. He carries this with each step.

(He follows him, thinking he is a good man.)

 

Jake Chambers grows up in Mid-World.

With Roland teaching him the gunslinger ways, with him learning about his shine through trial and error.

Jake Chambers grows up, tall and still skinny but with a tan to his skin, palms rough and calloused, and with an aim that isn’t half bad even if Roland probably won’t ever say it out right. He gets better, he gets good. Roland praises him in ways never said out loud, just corrects him less and less until he is nodding from a foot away, eyes narrowing to see the target he successfully knocked down. Roland even depends on him in a fight, Jake might be able to count the number of times on one hand but this is still a feat of its own.

They return to Keystone Earth a handful of times, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes because Roland misses the taste of undiluted sugar.

It is five years later when he realizes Roland has barely aged at all.

 

While there are worlds beyond this one and lives beyond their own, most of the time, they do not see another person for days on end.

The two of them often find themselves feeling like they are alone in a world they know to be one of a universe with infinite realities. It feels like a miracle that they are the ones here together even though if it was always going to happen the way it does when he dreams of a gunslinger he has no name for while the gunslinger dreams of revenge.

Jake says to Roland in his head using his shine, over the crackling of a fire, over the low howl of wind picking up for the night. He thinks he has been building up to this for far longer than he realizes.  

_I think I want to kiss you._

Roland looks at him, over the flames and through the smoke that curls up high, “I’m not going to give a coward what he wants.”

“…And if I admit it out loud?”

“You are just going to have to find out now, don’t you?” Roland tells him in answer, biting down on the meat of the rabbit they caught, a snap of bone between his teeth. Roland aims to intimidate, that much is clear.

Jake just thinks it isn't all that menacing when the man is dragging his tongue up his hand to catch the oil dripping from the rabbit. Or maybe, he is just deliberate.

 

The last gunslinger has his own journey to make, doomed to live a mistake of his own choosing again and again until— Maybe it doesn't have to end the way it always does.

Worlds end and cycles break, it is about time something happens.

 

They chase out the monsters from the dark to kill them in the light of the setting evening sun. The red yellow orange glow makes the blood splattered across their clothes a little brighter, a little like whatever they are doing is worth something. Jake enjoys the thought of the unfathomable, the dark tower is reassuring when he is only a very small part of a very big universe.

He likes to think about all the lives he has come across and all those other ones he will never come close to encountering in his time and how _here_ is where he ends up. With a kill fresh in his mind, the adrenaline still rushing through his veins after Roland inevitably saves him from another very close call, Jake admits.

"I might have a death wish." 

When Roland laughs with blood on his clothes and his guns back in their holsters, Jake leans over and kisses him.

 

"You do," Roland doesn't say, he also doesn't tell him the truth.

Good is not entirely irrelevant when he is trying.

 

Jake mentions trust, once.

Made Roland laugh, a low tumbling thing that washes over him, tasting sweet. Jake doesn’t like to call it inevitability. He reckons it feels a whole lot like it though when his eyes follow in each and every way he goes, when he is drawn to Roland’s abilities and just how much he is holding back.

“It gets you killed.”

Roland tells him, later, picking up a conversation Jake thought was long over. Roland's laugh never does leave much room for argument, not when it leaves Jake feeling like all the air is knocked out from his lungs.

“What?”

“Trust.” Roland answers, nonchalant.

Jake doesn’t know everything about Roland Deschain, he doesn’t need to. He is content in knowing what he knows, the gunslinger is trying to atone for something. Jake thinks he is okay with not knowing at all because there is a place at Roland's side that is his even if there is no name for it.

“There are worse ways to die, Roland.”

 

 

(And if it is at his hands, there is surely another world out there where this isn’t true.)

 


End file.
